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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Given their intelligence, one wonders what they would be like if they lived say 20 years? Would they be ruling the oceans?

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Especially true since living longer often means helping to raise and teach children - passing on knowledge.

Many land animals are intelligent and raise children so it's not clearly the only requirement for advanced development.

....they do certainly have the finger like dexterity for fine object control though.

If you like sci-fi, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky plays with this concept. It's the second book in a series though, first being Children of Time.

Super imaginative and well written, I really liked them.

I've wondered this, too. If they lived long enough after the new generation is born, they might've developed language or some other communication system.

I thought they communicated via semaphore? Their cousins the cuttlefish certainly do.

One researcher has seen "communication" in one species of octopus, but it's mostly looking big and dark to drive away others, or small and light before being driven away[0]. It's a very primitive communication, like rattlesnakes do to scare away dangers. Not the kind of complex system I was thinking of.

I'm being very human-centric, though. It just seems like if they're intelligent enough to recognize individual faces, use tools, and learn from what other octopi do, a complex language would be inevitable. And from there they'd accrue oral histories and localized cultures.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

Their reproduction strategy would have to change, when you produce 100,000 eggs and die taking care of them there’s not much chance to develop culture.

I highly recommend the Netflix documentary ’My Octopus Teacher‘. This is the story of a photographer diving everyday for a year, and developing a two way bond with an octopus.

maybe self destroy their own species and so only the short lived one persist

I find this amusing as this is an inherently human emotional evaluation. Perhaps that is not the point in the grand scheme of things?

Octopuses have survived for 500+ millions of years and I would say more intelligent and peaceful than humans who 'ruled' or savaged their own species for... what benefit actually?

I'm not sure about the 'peaceful' claim, that seems to me to be something of a romanticism. It's called the 'law of the jungle' for a reason, after all, e.g. -

https://www.livescience.com/47982-octopus-cannibalism-video-...

But I think it's true that human intelligence has made us have a greater impact on the world, both for good and for evil.

A viable chance at getting off this rock.

500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. Humans are the only species we’ve observed that has a viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales; and we will likely bring other life along with us for that ride.

Short of another human-equivalent species evolving, or a hyper resilient organism that can piggy back on space debris, humans are literally the only shot life on Earth has.

Why does that matter? Why are humans so special? I 'feel' like octopuses are the better candidate :) putting aside trivial human aspirations....

When they successfully escape earths orbit, get back to me.

Until then, all odds are stacked against them. They’re going to go extinct in an instant on a cosmic timescale. Unless, of course, humans choose to bring them along and save them from that fate.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it's interesting to me that in our many hundred thousand year history as a species, the "point" of our intelligence (by your measure) wasn't even a suggestion until maybe 120 years ago, and only a dream until maybe 60 years ago. What are the chances?

Perhaps a scholar in 320 AD would also have been surprised by how remarkable it was that the true purpose of human intelligence had only been so recently discovered.

Bingo.

This is the chasm that needs to be crossed. Its not just the immediate advantage your species gets from intelligence. It’s cultivating that to a point where you realize all life on this planet is default extinct. Then getting your species to the point where you even have a _chance_ of changing that default.

Humans are still default extinct. We are on a path to changing that default.

to follow up on the point above, how do you know that leaving earth is the only way to escape extinction? that's only what you can imagine given the technology available, just like someone living in 320 couldn't conceive of space travel.

I agree that the ultimate purpose of any species is to continue to exist. I'm just skeptical because your definition of that is so related to modern science fiction

I mean eventually the sun will lose energy and hell, a planet destroying asteroid could hit at any time.

No we're not, at best we're just changing the timeline. You're still either time bound by the death of the universe best case scenario or resource bound before that happens (if the universe can "end"). Extinction is inevitable at any timescale.

Well the whole point of the game of life is to keep the game going for as long as possible.

One response from the Christian tradition is that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational, moral, and spiritual faculties. Other animals lack these faculties. Furthermore, we are decreed to be stewards over the created order by divine command.

Christianity decrees its followers to be stewards over the created order, but outside of some small groups, there's no major tradition of vegetarianism in Christianity, nor any particular care for ecology and sustainability as is practiced in many other religions.

Because stewardship of the earth got translated into dominion over it and that became the dominant narrative in a dominant branch of Christianity in most of the world (Evangelicalism).

Dinosaurs perished to become oil to power our technology, they deserve some credit.

It was mostly the plant species alive in that time, not dinosaurs per se.

> 500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale.

How so? It’s 1/8 of the lifespan of the planet and about 3.5% of the age of the universe.

That is not “a blink of an eye”, that’s a pretty impressive innings by any definition.

Humans will be lucky if we make 1 million years at this rate.

Well, according to the Big Freeze theory (seems to be the most probable) 500 million years is less than a blink of an eye when compared to the time the universe will consume until it cannot anymore.

> viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales

how incredibly arrogant.

I would prefer ambitious.

Arrogant is a tremendous understatement. There's a chance that 10 million years ago on some other planet existed a far more advanced civilization than humans could ever imagine, but they died out after 1 million years. So they would have had 1 million years of advancement, which is still 50 times more advancement than the 2000 or so years of scientific progress we've had, and even that would be but a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a blink of an eye in space and time. To think that "humans have a viable chance of surviving cosmic time" is incredulous if you know even rudimentary physics.

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